Whether it qualifies or not as specifically SEO they got 200k email addresses who they are sending regular emails to with links to codecademy.com. They are 100% getting links from that. Not to mention codecademy now ranks #1 for "learn to code" for me (although they may have before). It's just a perfect example of how to leverage to your strengths as a startup, SEO really should never be the entire point of doing anything these days (and I say that as someone whose primary job description is SEO lol!).

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but: http://econnectemail.com/

I have yet to dive into these things, but was looking at starting a mass marketing email campaign soon so need to get on something similar to that or mailchimp.

I don't get it either. All they have is a pretty vague landing page and codecademy has just a handful crappy low level tutorials. I see no reason for the upswell in interest in this. They are clearly doing promotion very well. This seems like a good case study of how to start on a good note...

I get it, I just was curious if they got more traffic through search engines than I gave them credit for. I think if anything, they are a classic example of a site going viral through social media and blogs.

You know, seems like every month or two now, some site like Codeyear goes viral, all these sites that have landing pages very similar stylistically to Codeyear. A lot of the time it's because, although these site are unknown, they have a lot of connected people with vested interests in them who are going crazy publicizing them the first day. Like Codeyear, that famous VC guy Fred Wilson blogged about it and I *feel* like I read he was an investor in Codeacademy, although a quick look at his blog post about it doesn't say that.

There was a thing about Hipster.com and how it had something like 30k pre-launch signups before anyone knew what it did. It's really weird how launch pages go viral these days, and I wish to god I knew how they did it, cause I have 5 ppl who have signed up for my upcoming site's announce list hah.

I also would not be shocked at ALL if all these startups going viral are paying big money to some under-the-radar viral marketing places. I read this interview a while ago with a guy who ran a business that would make videos go viral, but it was all hush-hush, you know there are tons of people doing this stuff though. This guy made a video for his company as a calling card, it was hilarious, hmm lemme find... oh yeah here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uovMpapeCJQ

Anyhow, I lost my train of thought, post over.

Read that post about how Balsamiq launched, very informative about how you "go viral" (get people who have a huge audience interested in your stuff to talk about you).

Just in case you didn't sign-up, when you do so it gives an unobtrusive pop-up that asks you to share on twitter or Facebook. It's a very clever trick, because it's extremely prominent without being annoying.

Thank you - very helpful.

1. Just google "paypal site integration" or something similar - they have extensive help for developers. If you are doing recurring payments, I recommend Chargify.

2. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-...ographic-11928

follow that link and you'll be doing better than 99% of sites out there.

If anybody knows a good web developer and/or SEO specialist around the Vancouver area, please pm me.

Thanks

Sort of. You're leaving out one of the big factors which is what your competitors are bidding and their relative QS.

Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, has a Youtube video which explains the weighting and basic math. I find it amusing the video has so few views despite being over a year old, especially given that Adwords is used by so many people and misunderstood by plenty.

Is it somewhere in this thread?

Thanks great read, we do most of that already except one or two which we will be doing soon!

Can you explain more to me about your site/business? So, you designed some software to make games, then people use that software to make games and you host them on your site? Just interested in what you are doing...

Cant believe I have only just come across this thread.... some really good content here.

Yeah, Construct 2 is a tool that lets you make games/apps without knowing programming, it exports all games to HTML5. It also can export to Phonegap, the idea being write one game and press a button and it will export to lots of different platforms. We're focussing on HTML5 at the moment as we think it's the most exciting technology at the moment but the possibility of adding extra exporters in the future was always the plan. My brothers written the editor himself and it's ~250,000 lines of code which is crazy.

We ran an advert on a HTML5 arcade site and they converted really well, so the arcade we have is as a promotional tool to show off games made in Construct 2 (it's not got much content yet but it will build up, we're running competitions which are quite popular) and also as way to attract casual games to our product.

We don't really care about making money on the arcade through adverts or anything like that, it's just a way to attract people to the actual product. Allthough the option is there, if you embed one of our games in an iframe it forces you to show an advert so there's a possibility of that being a good money earner in the future if we get enough plays/embeds. For now though we just show a Construct 2 advert.

One thing I've learnt is selling digital goods on the web is great, no suppliers, not too much rake etc. Every sale costs us around 40p. I'm a bit of a noob (this thread has made me realise this, I don't think I'm as big a noob anymore) when it comes to SEO/Marketting online so I've learnt a ton over the last few months.

have you thought much about making the full-version construct software free and monetizing your product in other ways?

We already offer a free edition which is very functional and useful, gets downloaded a lot. We then have messages inside the program which encourage them to upgrade along with a few feature limitations with the same purpose. It seems to be fairly effective, we're working on enlarging the gap between the free and paid edition though as we're not getting a high enough % of people upgrading. We're trying to not make it a huge PITA, our main objective is to get people using it.

Apart from that I can't really think of any other models where it's a free full version where we could monetise it effectively.

If the world population is 7B how many websites total are there? Assuming the ratio per capita is highest in America what's the ratio of American sites per American citizen.

What's the percentage of websites worldwide geared towards America? A disproportionately large % of all websites is geared toward the American consumer, what's the %?

What's the average carbon footprint of a website?

If you google "Green Hosting" you'll get tons of results for web hosting companies that are green. I haven't really looked into it but here's some stuff on Hostgator: http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml

All those questions are really hard to answer! I can't find numbers for # websites later than 2008 so I think saying ~100m website might be the right ballpark now. How do you define website anyway?

How do you define an American site? How do you define a site geared towards America?

Carbon footprint can probably be best measured in data transfer I suppose. Another article from 2008 says 1mb transfered = 1 lump of coal:
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-10152_10...d-1-lump-coal/

But seems a bit spurious. Going to be really really hard to work any of this stuff out

I came up with those questions last night while doing a bit of drinking and thinking. I realize they're pretty impossible to answer, it just seems like there are more sites than people and more sites than necessary.

If my 62 yr old mother has a website ( she knows nothing about what she's doing or even why she really has a website - but that's a whole other story, not to mention she's making some ridiculously terrible hosting company rich) and I have 30 sites it seems like a safe bet that there is a website for every person in America.

i don't have any idea how you'd define some of those things but I'd have to think like 80% of all websites are aimed at Americans?

Is it possible to know the # of registered domains? That # seems like possibly a good starting point.

Just thinking about and trying to come up with some idea of how much waste/ bloat there is in the internet. If there are 100m websites it seems like all but the top million don't get enough traffic or add anything useful enough to warrant their existence.

- Really depends what you consider a website, this is a wildly nebulous term, and if you yourself can't define what you mean by "website", then it's tough to really consider any theories about if there are too many or not.

- 80% of websites being "aimed at Americans" seems extremely unlikely. A lot of websites aren't "aimed" at any particular country, but even if you take all the ones that are, just pretend that there are only 3 countries in the world: US, England and Canada, and already your 80% number is going to be too high, and that's ignoring every other country in the world.

- Websites don't need to "warrant their existence". Take some pointless site with it's own domain, that gets 1 visit per year: It is using almost zero resources of any kind. Depending on what it is, maybe it uses 10 MB of storage space on some shared webserver, that is nothing, it's peanuts, the environmental impact is close to nil. If this site becomes massively popular, starts to fill up a majority of the shared server, and the hosting company has to buy another server, then there is at least *some* environmental impact.

The idea of 1MB of bandwidth = 1 chunk of coal, I would say there is almost no way anyone has determined that accurately, it's way too simplistic, and waaaaay too convenient that 2 things that everyone sort of understands and are easy to use in a comparison, just HAPPEN to be equivalent to each other, you know?

1 mb = 1 lump of coal = oceans would overflow from all the coal dumped into it from my downloading alone

Maybe that's true in a vacuum. If there are 90 million useless sites there certainly has to be a pretty large impact when you consider the resources involved with those sites, hosting, billing, registering domains, etc..

The additional strain it puts on the rest of the internet has to have a pretty significant impact as well?

i would like to have info about a website. its daily traffic, income, keyword people use to get there etc.

Whats the best way to do that?